the first woman awarded the nobel prize in physiology & medicine - three offprints

Three rare offprints by the Nobel Prize-winning biochemists Gerty Cori (1896-1957) and her husband Carl.

Gerty Cori was born in Prague and educated privately, then entered the University of Prague's medical school, which only rarely accepted women. There she met her husband Carl and the couple emigrated to America, beginning a life-long scientific partnership that survived several attempts by academic institutions to restrict her work in favour of her husband's career.

The Coris 'made two renowned discoveries: that carbohydrates are stored in the liver and muscles and are changed into glucose that can be used by the body; and that certain hormones affect the metabolism of carbohydrates... They postulated that blood glucose is changed to muscle glycogen which then becomes blood lactic acid. Blood lactic acid is then able to form liver glycogen, which completes the cycle by becoming blood glucose when the body needs it. This cycle is known as the Cori cycle, which was proposed in 1929. When they moved to St. Louis, the Coris continued to work on carbohydrates and disproved the current belief that glycogen metabolized glucose by hydrolysis. They demonstrated that the breakdown of glycogen involved the formation of glucose-1-phosphate, which was referred to as the Cori ester. The enzyme that catalyzed this reaction was isolated by the Coris and named phosphorylase... The Coris shared the Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine in 1947 with Bernardo Houssay of Argentina, making Gerty Cori the first woman to win the medicine and physiology Nobel Prize' (Ogilvie, Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science, p. 293).

Three offprints, two with green wrappers printed in black, one lacking wrappers, wrappers of the first offprint partially tanned, rust marks from staples, a very good set.